The nuclear community, both commercial and governmental, contaminates a large quantity of metals and alloys annually. Some of the contamination is only surface while other is blended homogeneously through the metal. Rather than discard the contaminated materials, there are several incentives to decontaminate them for recycle.
There are economic motivations that make recycling attractive. If an inexpensive method for decontamination could be found, high quality material could be made at a fraction of the cost that conversion from ore would require. Strategic resources such as cobalt, chromium, nickel, aluminum, zirconium and titanium could be recovered.
Postutilization storage costs would also be less since material that would ordinarily be placed in a containment repository could be reused. This avoids the need for both preliminary containment processing as well as continued inventory and control of the waste. Circumventing waste containment also has an environmental payoff since storage of contaminated materials risks the danger of their spread by water runoff, wind or natural catastrophe.
It is important that any process developed must be able to remove contaminated materials not only from the surface of metals but also from within those metals which experience homogeneous contamination.